As a tribute to horror icon Wes Craven, the master
manipulator who scared us silly with the franchise-spawning A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), I am offering the following
feature story based on an interview I conducted with the filmmaker at the 1994
Toronto Film Festival in conjunction with the world premiere of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
At the time, I was quite impressed with the movie, which
I described in my original
Variety review as an ingeniously conceived and devilishly clever film that
proved Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
(1991) wasn't so aptly named after all. But I was even more impressed by the blunt-spoken,
self-deprecating candor displayed by Craven — who passed away Sunday at age 76 –
as he discussed his reasons for returning to the franchise, and some of the
real-life inspirations for his on-screen horror stories.
Some horror masters look so innocuous, so respectable, so
absolutely normal, it's hard to believe they're capable of unleashing
blood-and-thunder bogeymen.
Clive Barker, the author and sometime filmmaker who gave
us Hellraiser and Night Breed, is a boyishly handsome and
cheerful fellow who wouldn't appear out of place as the hero's best friend in
some British-produced comedy of manners. David Cronenberg, the eccentric auteur
of Scanners, Videodrome and the 1986 remake of The Fly, has the bookish, button-down demeanor of someone who might
specialize in quantum physics or international economics.
On the other hand, there's Wes Craven. You take one look
at this guy, with his vaguely sinister beard, his mischievously twinkling eyes,
his wicked smile of complicity with every dirty trick in the book -- you see
all of that, and you figure, ''Yeah, this guy would love to scare the hell out
of you.''
And he's the first to admit that, yes, he would. With no
apologies whatsoever.
Which was a major part Craven's motivation for returning
to the scene of the crime, so to speak, to write and direct a follow-up to his
1984 shocker, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
That was the film in which audiences got their first glimpse of Freddy Krueger,
the fire-scarred, razor-fingered fiend who, over the course of five sequels,
became a perversely popular cult figure.
Three years ago, the character was decisively destroyed
in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.
In Hollywood, however, nothing is ever really final. That's why there now is something called Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
''When they first approached me to do to a new film,''
Craven recalled during an interview at the recent Toronto International Film
Festival, ''the initial injunction from New Line Cinema was, 'We were maybe
thinking about making one more Freddy film, but we kind of killed him off. Do
you have any ideas how we might bring him back?'''
So it was the creative challenge that brought Craven back
to the horror series he had abandoned years earlier? ''Well,'' Craven admitted with a chuckle, ''there also
were some very tangible business
aspects that made it a very sweet proposition…
''But,'' the filmmaker quickly added, ''the problem was —
and all of us agreed on this — we didn't want to make one where we just said,
'Oh, (Freddy's Dead ) was only a
dream — he's really still alive.' So, the challenge was to figure out how to do
a film about Freddy where the audience wouldn't hoot us out of the theater.
''And at first, I didn't have a clue, really, how to do
it.''
Craven, a 55-year-old Cleveland, Ohio, native, made his
filmmaking debut in 1972 with The Last
House on the Left, a blood-soaked exploitation movie that received serious
critical attention from, among other people, Roger Ebert. He followed that with
an equally violent drama, The Hills Have
Eyes (1977), then lightened up a bit with a tongue-in-cheek comic-book
adventure, Swamp Thing (1982).
After A Nightmare
on Elm Street, he continued to illuminate horror stories with flashes of
dark comedy in such films as Deadly
Friend (1986), Shocker(1989) and The
People Under the Stairs (1991).
In making another sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven hoped ''to honestly explain to
myself why I felt so generally positive about making scary films, and why so
much of the audience felt so positive, even while, at the same time, these
movies seem to upset so many people.'' As a result, pre-production planning
involved a fair amount of self-analysis.
Craven forced himself to consider some traumatic events
from his childhood — ''A divorce, an abusive situation in the family, drinking,
a scary father, things like that.'' At the same time, he also paid attention to
the real-life horrors that are major attractions on TV newscasts.
''And I had this realization that, when I make films,
usually, on the floor of the sound stage, we're all laughing. And I'm feeling
great. And the audiences that I see coming out of my films often are giggling,
or really excited and laughing. I've never seen anybody coming out of one of my
films where they've looked beaten down, or really depressed, or like they're
going to go out and kill themselves.
''What I think stories like (Nightmare on Elm Street ) do is, they somehow put a shape and face on the things that terrify us.
Things from our memories, or simply from real life out there... And this gives
us a sense of control about things. It's like, look, here's a story that's
being told by another human, about the things that frighten us the most,
whatever they are.''
Craven got his latest inspiration for new and improved
ways to scare people while lunching with actress Heather Langenkamp, the
resourceful heroine of the first Nightmare
movie. Langenkamp described her unpleasant experiences involving harassing
phone calls from an obsessed fan. Craven sympathized. But he also recognized
the dramatic possibilities.
Shortly afterward, Craven said, ''I just had a dream in
which Freddy was sort of going through this cocktail party with all these
different people that I knew. And he was talking and cracking jokes and
everything. And I was thinking, 'See, this is the problem with Freddy — he's
become too familiar.'
''But then I saw this very shadowy, very dark Freddy
shape in the back, behind the curtains. And I was aware that this was something
quite separate from Robert (Englund, the actor who played Freddy). Yet it was
in the same general shape. That's when I realized in the dream that this was
the original thing that had inspired me to construct Freddy as a character in
the first place.''
The next day, Craven started working on his screenplay
for New Nightmare, a devilishly clever and amusingly self-referential thriller.
Craven's audacious conceit is that his first Nightmare on Elm Street and the five
sequels made by other directors were works of fiction that inadvertently
summoned, and briefly contained, a real supernaturally evil force.
Unfortunately, after Freddy was killed off in 1991's Final Nightmare, the evil force was freed to wreak havoc — while
still in the form of Freddy — on an unsuspecting world.
And that, Craven explains while playing himself in the
movie's funniest sequence, is why he simply must make another Nightmare movie. It's the only way he
can save humanity. Really.
Craven isn't the only returnee from the first film.
Heather Langenkamp also is on hand, typecast to perfection as Heather
Langenkamp, an actress with a cult following for her performance in Nightmare on Elm Street.
Ten years later, Langenkamp still is on good terms with
her Nightmare co-stars (including Robert Englund and John Saxon, also
cast as themselves). But she's reluctant to appear in a brand-new Nightmare sequel.
Unfortunately, even though she wants no part of another
Freddy flick, Freddy Krueger — or, to be more precise, the real-life
monster who has assumed Freddy's form — just won't stay out of her life. And
her dreams.
''Right from the start,'' Craven said, ''I gave myself a
warning that this film had to be a stand-alone thing. I couldn't imagine anyone
who would end up going to see it who wasn't aware of the whole phenomenon of
Freddy Krueger, and the whole Nightmare
series. But nothing absolutely essential is lost if you haven't seen any of the
earlier films.
“'On the other hand, if you have seen the first one — especially
if you've seen it recently — you get a lot of the references. And you get the
whole idea that (Langenkamp) is slipping into the world of that first film,
whether she likes it or not.''
And that is something Wes Craven likes very, very much.
